The invention relates to methods and systems for online bill payment website applications; and more particularly, to new methods and systems for automatically setting up bill pay payments in an online bill pay system.
Online bill pay systems allow a user to pay bills from various payees through a website portal of a financial institution or a third party website portal service provider. These online bill payment systems (sometime called online bill payment application or online bill payment solutions) are offered by financial institutions such as banks, credit card issuers, stock brokers, etc. The online bill pay systems allow a user to view, review, and/or make payments and pay bills to various payees from the user's financial account at the respective financial institutions.
The user simply navigates to the online bill payment website using a web browser on a web enabled device, such as a personal computer, or even a cell phone, connected to the internet. Generally, the user sets up a list of payees in the online bill payment application and then can enter payment instructions for each payee that the user desires to make a payment. The user creates the user's list of payees by selecting the payees from a list of available payees provided by the online bill payment application. The application may also allow the user to search for payees using search terms, alphabetized groups, categorized groups, or the like. The user can make individual payments or can set up recurring payments to a payee, such as a specified amount every month or other periodic payment.
Some online bill payment applications have the capability to receive electronic bills (also referred to as e-bills), in which case the user can use the online bill payment application to view the bill, and then make a desired payment. If the user receives e-bills on the bill payment system for a payee, the user may be able to set up automatic recurring payments in which the bill payment system may make a payment to the payee for the full outstanding balance, the minimum required payment, or another amount specified by the user. In this way, once the user sets up the payment preferences for a payee, the bill payment application can make payments to the payee without any further action by the user. This provides a significant convenience to the user.
While providing many conveniences to the user, the current online bill payment applications have some limitations too. For example, a user must first set up a payee in the online banking application to add the payee to the user's list of payees. Some users may not know how to do this, or may be too concerned of making an error or doing something incorrectly, or may not have the time to set up the payees. In addition, online bill payment applications can only make electronic payments to payees that are registered (meaning the payee is already set up in the bill payment system). For non-registered payees, the online bill payment applications may be able to send a check, but even in this case, the user must provide all of the payment information for the payee, such as payee name, and address. Moreover, users may have accounts with multiple financial institutions. As a result, if a user is currently paying bills from an account at a different financial institution from the bill payment system, then those payees cannot be set up of the user in the bill payment system because they are unknown to the bill payment system.
Personal finance software applications (including online applications) allow a user to organize and track accounts and activity at multiple financial institutions, but do not have the ability to automatically make payments to a user's payees. As examples, Quicken® is a desktop and online personal finance software application, available from Intuit Inc., Mountain View, Calif., and Mint® is an online application (See the website “mint.com”). Such personal finance applications can perform financial management functions such as managing bills and providing reminders to pay bills, tracking and managing investments, performing budgeting tasks, viewing and printing summaries and reports, preparing and printing expense reports, and writing checks. The applications can download banking, financial and billing data directly from banks, companies, and financial institutions through a secure internet connection. The applications can create a financial profile of the user in which users can review their financial “picture,” review spending and saving habits, create budgets and spending and saving goals, calculate gains and losses on investments, and have reminders set to emphasize dates on which bills or other obligations are to be paid. More sophisticated applications can also manage small business income and expenses, and investment properties. The applications can also compare a user's bank accounts, credit cards, brokerage accounts, and even other service and utility accounts like cellular phone service, cable/satellite TV, gas and electric, with competing accounts to determine if there are more cost effective options.
One known online banking system allows a user to aggregate financial data from numerous financial institutions from a single website, and then analyzes and organizes the data and provides the financial management functions described above for personal finance applications. This online banking system is FinanceWorks™ provided by Intuit Financial Services, a unit of Intuit Inc., of Mountain View, Calif. However, FinanceWorks™ does not provide any bill payment functions.
While current online bill payment applications and personal finance management applications provide some functionality for paying, managing and reviewing bills, additional functionality can be useful.